Data collection

data-ideas.md

How do I search for data?

• Search by ${topic} geodata on Google

• Go to a page I already know with data links:

  • Natural Earth: http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/
  • Esri Living Atlas: https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/en/ (mostly for data published as esri services)
  • This awesome list of public geodata: https://freegisdata.rtwilson.com/ (unfortunately hard to keep up to date)

• Search for open data portals of the location I am interested in (most big cities have an open data portal)

  • Recently found: Esri Open Data & A map of open data portals

• Other repos/lists with data:

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GIS_data_sources
  • https://github.com/awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets <- I think they check if the data is still available by making a request to the data url: https://github.com/awesomedata/apd-core/blob/master/deploy/render.py#L54 I find this really useful..

Ideas on how to improve this

• Generally geoportals are used to show data (then you can search by extent, by topic, by format, by geometry, by license). Building a geoportal though takes a lot of time? Maybe a repo with a small website that presents that data allowing users to search by this criteria would be good as well. We could contact Robin to see if he'd like to join in creating such a repo with his datasets. He might not want to give up his website though...
• Would be useful to automatically check if the data is still available. Maybe like the awesome public datasets does it?
• We would not list data that is on open data portal? (some have thousands of datasets and APIs to automatically retrieve the data, I think it's not worth to also link them in our repo?)